BAFT Europe Bank to Bank Highlights

Feb 6, 2017 | Amy Hirth

This year’s BAFT European Forum was held in Madrid, Spain. Image: Shutterstock

The Bankers Association for Finance and Trade (BAFT) hosted the Europe Bank to Bank Forum in Madrid, Spain earlier this month. In attendance were global transaction banking leaders and Ripple’s own Danny Aranda, managing director for Europe, and Ryan Zagone, head of regulatory relations, discussing their perspectives on various industry challenges and opportunities facing the transaction banking industry.

Aranda spoke alongside Julio Faura, head of innovation, R&D at Santander, Wim Raymaekers, global head, banking market at SWIFT and Jonathan Vaux, executive director at Visa Europe on a panel discussing the relationship between banks and fintechs. The conversation centered around the question of whether banks and fintechs can continue to evolve in partnership or if the current level of competition drives an adversarial outcome.

While other fintechs might seek disruption, Ripple works with banks to build on their existing networks and serve their customers’ ever-increasing demands for speedy, certain, and cost-effective payments.

Aranda said, “Ripple is providing the new system that banks need badly to execute both low and high value payments globally, whereas SWIFT is bolting an additional feature on an outdated infrastructure. We’ve moved well beyond the proof of concept stage, at this point we have 30 banks with active integrations using Ripple’s solution.”

The panelists found common ground on the topic of interoperability. Banks and fintechs agree that internet connectivity between bank’s core systems is necessary to revolutionizing the way money is sent around the world. Vaux of Visa gave a nod to Interledger as being an open technical standard to interoperability between payment systems.

As noted by Faura of Santander, Ripple was the first to present a collaborative framework between banks and blockchain technology and has already been used by Santander UK to complete successful remittance projects.

Zagone, who is also a member of BAFT’s Future Leader Program, attended various breakout sessions at the forum. Zagone noted, “Correspondent banking isn’t going to disappear, but the model will evolve — and needs to — in order to keep up with the demands of banks customers. Banks recognize that in order to meet their customers future demands they need to be working with smart fintechs like Ripple, who are trying to build the next iteration of payments.”

Find out more about how Ripple integrates with your bank by watching this video.